Read the September 15 meeting.

Thank you for coming today. My name is Paul Mitchell. I'm a regent and consultant that the city is hired to come in and look at redrawing the election boundaries for future city council elections.

Just to go over some terms that might be used that aren't common terms that most lay people would hear. At large, when I'm talking about an at large election system in Santa Ana, I just want to make sure everything's okay. Okay. We'll take a moment to make sure everything's good.

Is this...

You okay? Okay, thank you. Thanks for your patience. So, the term at large is something that will be used when we talk about district names. And at large means that a jurisdiction like a city or a school board or a water board, they have an election where all of the members of the board are elected by the entire area of that city or school board or water board or whatever. You can think of, in California, our current race right now for U.S. Senator, everybody in California is voting for the U.S. Senator.

However, for Congress, only the people in each congressional district are voting for their member of Congress. So the U.S. Senate election, Dianne Feinstein, Kevin DeLeon, that's an at-large election. and the congressional district you might live in, whether it's Rohrbacher or another, that is a district of election. It's not at large. And the courts have found that at-large elections have this tendency to dilute the voting strength of certain populations. Where if you have congressional districts drawn all over the state,

You can have a congressional district with strong Latino population that will elect a candidate that's preferred by the Latino candidate, the Latino voters. And you might have a congressional district with strong Asian population. Or you might have a congressional district that is along the coast and represents coastal issues. You might have a congressional district that is in an urban area or a suburban area. And by having all these little congressional districts, different populations of Californians have greater strength in electing candidates of their choice.

And so if we have elections in the city of Santa Ana that are by district, you could end up electing candidates to the council that represent the views of each of those districts to a stronger degree than they could in an at-large election system where those votes get kind of diluted by all the other populations. So it's about bringing that election process closer to the local voters and allowing them to elect candidates of their choice. There's a term called racially polarized voting that will be discussed when you're hearing these kinds of presentations.

And all that really means is that different voting behaviors based on admissibility. So we might look at data that suggests in one neighborhood they're voting for one candidate, and in another neighborhood they're voting for another candidate. And it can't be just explained by, well, this candidate spent more money, or this candidate walked precincts more over here, or this candidate, you know, lives in that area. It can be explained most effectively by looking at the racial composition of those voters.

In California, there are a lot of places, probably the majority of California, where you can distill voting patterns down to ethnicity, race, religion. And where that exists, the state is not one of us having at-large elections. They say, okay, if you're going to have at-large elections, we don't want you to be able to use that system if it weakens the voting power of these different groups that are voting against each other, that are racially polarized. So essentially, if you have racially polarized voting, you can't have at-large elections.

A couple other terms that are going to be used. One has to do with when we draw these districts. If I draw a district that is more than 50% Latino, the federal law would call that the majority-minority district, meaning the majority of the population is one minority group. That's one term that can be used in redistricting. We will have a, or maybe a few, majority-minority districts that are Latino.

There's another term for an influence district. And this is a little bit more of a range, but essentially an influence district is a district where that population can influence the outcome of the election. And what does that mean? Well, the courts have found in some places that that means that that district is 30% of one ethnicity. In other places, they might view it as being 20% of one ethnicity. I've seen even 17, 19% of one ethnicity.

It basically means does that ethnic population have enough density in that district for them to be able to have an outsized impact on electing who that candidate is going to be. And what we want to do where possible is if we can create a district that's majority minority, that's a real bright line. Now, if we can identify populations that we believe can have the ability to influence the outcome of an election, we want to do as much as we can to kind of draw them into the same district and maximize their ability to influence that election. So, that is, those are some terminologies that we'll be using.

Redistricting, it should be the first slide maybe, is the process of changing these boundaries.

And we need to change boundaries for local elections every 10 years after the U.S. Census comes out. We're doing right now what would be called a mid-decade redistricting, meaning we're redistricting at a time when the – we don't have a new census, we're not doing it on the regular schedule, we're doing it because of this particular lawsuit, this particular issue with the way that CNN runs their elections.

So there's always a fear when we're drawing boundaries that these districts are going to be drawn in a way to advantage one group or advantage another group, that they'd be using redistricting as a way to, you know, kind of work the map out into their favors. We don't want that. We want to have a process that's open, transparent, and follows good redistricting principles that have come down either from state or federal laws or have come down from Supreme Court or even other court decisions.

Essentially, this first example is a great example of a part of the redistricting process that was created by a Supreme Court president. And the Supreme Court actually ruled on this particular bullet point last year. And this is the concept. When we draw districts, we're going to draw them so they're equal size. And that makes a lot of sense. You're going to have six seats, and you're going to be equal, great. But there's a debate that starts. Are they going to be equal based on how many people live there?

Is it going to be equal just based on how many people are voters? Or maybe it's going to be based on how many people are above 18. Or maybe it's going to be based on how many people are above 18 citizens. What is going to be, what are we measuring to say they're equal? And the federal courts, the Supreme Court just last year reiterated that equal means population. It does not take into account how many people are registered to vote. It does not take into account how many people are citizens. It does not take into account how many people are kids. It is simply from the U.S. Census, the most recent U.S. Census, the total population.

When we look at the total population of the cities that end, we find around 325,000 people. If we were to break up these districts to be perfectly even sized, perfectly even would be 54,098 people in each district. And believe it or not, congressional districts are drawn to be perfectly even. One person above or below, but perfectly even were congressional districts. We're allowed a lot more freedom when we draw these districts. We're going to say that those districts are as equal as possible or fracturable. And for most redistricting at this level, we're going to look at drawing districts that are within 5% deviation.

And that's total deviation, meaning that the largest district is no more than 5% larger than the smallest district counting population.

Now, we will consider other factors in population to look at different things. Like as an example, if we're looking at a map and we want to see how strong of an influence district we can create or how much of a majority-minority district we can create, we really want to look at who are eligible voters and the census gives us for as a proxy for eligible voters the citizen voting age population and we have a current population in the community survey of

332 000 that means that this current census believes that we've grown by two and a half percent here we have adult citizens of 140 000 a current voter registration of 98 000. When we talk about the ethnicity of a district, we're going to be talking about it within the context of this newer American Community Survey, it's something called the Citizen Voting Age Population, and I have some slides on that.

Another thing we want to do to make sure that we're not pulling any tricks with these districts is we're going to make a very simple rule with these districts. They have to be whole. We're not going to draw districts where they start in one area, kind of disappear and pop up somewhere else. We're going to draw districts in our whole. It seems simple, but up in LA County there's a water board, and these districts aren't even particulates. They're just going to pop up here and there.

Maintain communities of interest. Maintaining communities of interest is a lot of the reason why we're here, because we want to hear from the community what are their communities of interest. There are essentially the top tier of communities of interest would be those that are protected by state and federal law. And those would be the protected classes based on ethnicity, national origin, religion, other factors. And when we're looking at redistricting, particularly California, we look a lot at Latinos and Asians. In some parts of Southern California we look at African American population.

There isn't a very dense African American population in Santa Ana. We can also look at religious communities. So what I did in San Diego, I did a whole mapping based on Catholic Iraqis. Paldeans is what they're called. And then we can look at other ethnic national communities, like in Glendale, the Armenian population, the Long Beach and the Cambodian population. So we can look at different populations within it, but when we're talking about redistricting in most of Southern California, we're very heavily looking at Latinos and Asians.

As I was mentioning, the way we count Latinos and Asians is by looking at the citizen voting age population. And based on that, the citizen voting age population Asian in Santa Ana is 17% of the city. For Latinos it's 60%. But what's interesting about it is it's not as if everywhere in San An is 60% Latino and everywhere in San An is 17% Asian. That's absolutely not how most cities in California in particular are formed.

When we look at the census data and we map it, we can see where the densities are. This is a map of Latino population. And as you can see, there is a darker area and some lighter areas, meaning the darker areas are the higher numbers of cities and voting age population Latinos. And if you can see this, it's a little bit, you might have it in your handouts, but this shows that there are certain areas where it's 70, 80, 90, we even have one area that's 99% Latino.

When we look at the Asian population, we see kind of the opposite. We see some areas, particularly over here, with high Asian population. And this is where we are right now. And then there's a couple little pockets down here. When we look at the percentages, it's not as high as the Latino population percentage. We don't have an area that's 99% Asian. But we do have some areas that are 50, 75 percent, and so on. Down here are some that are around 40 and 30 percent Asian. We have one down here that's 30 percent Asian. But we see that the bulk of it is in this area. And we'll come back to this.

Keep an eye on this area and how that looks, and we'll come back and see something else that looks a lot like that.

The communities of interest though don't stop at race and ethnicity. Communities of interest can mean other things about how a community views itself. So, it could be people living in their industry. So, if we were redistricting in Torrance, we'd be talking about aerospace workers. If we're redistricting in Santa Ana, we might be looking at people who work in different industries. Like one part of the city might have a lot of more people that work in manufacturing, a lot of more people that work in industries around tourism, Disneyland, and things like that.

So there's different communities of interest built around that work, how people work. There's also things like senior citizens centers. I did a redistricting in Santa Barbara where there was a whole community of interest around the college. And there was literally a town that was almost 80% college students and college professors and grad students and so on. It could be issues of access to certain amenities. What I mean by that is people living here at Hillside up in the St. Gabriel Valley or somebody living there in an ocean or somebody living there near a river.

It could be these other things that define people. You know, you don't see a lot of surfers in the Midwest. You see the surfers by the ocean, and they are a community of interest.

There could be other things like homeowners and renters. People live down near Main Street. People live more of a bedroom community and so on.

Another criteria we're going to use, and this I think becomes one of the key criteria outside of ethnicity when we look at the city of Santa Ana and the feedback we've received so far about communities of interest. And it has to do with following existing boundaries. We have the exterior boundary of the city of Santa Ana, but there are a lot of boundaries inside the city of Santa Ana. We have some natural boundaries like the Santa Ana River, we've got streets, right? We've got three ways. We've got these things that kind of bisect and cut the city up a little bit.

But we also have governmental boundaries that I think are very important. And we have actually some mapping that will go through each of those. And then finally, keeping districts compact. Compactness does not mean small.

Compactness means that if we're going to draw these districts, We're going to draw them to be more circles and squares and triangles and rectangles and less serpents and weird shapes and things traveling all the way around from one side of the city to the other. We're going to try to draw them in ways that are more compounded.

If we look at the current districts, this gives us a good starting point for what we can kind of envision in the drawing of the new districts as well. We don't have to follow these existing boundaries, but these existing boundaries do one thing right. They have equal population. If we broke the city up into different districts and made them equal population, this does meet equal population. It also seems to have an overall pattern to it. Where there is a northernmost district, there are these vertical districts.

And one thing that we see that I think is potentially one of the reasons why we're here is remember I pointed out that portion of the Asian population here on the side of the San River where we are? This plan essentially divides that up into three different parts. So I don't know the thinking that went into the redifferting as it was done before, but The one thing I have seen in other areas is somebody will say, well this is ready. Because now, three of these council members, meaning half of the city council, have to take into account the views of the Asian population, because each of them have a little bit of the Asian population.

Or the flip side is, look, they've taken this very strong Asian population, they can elect a candidate of their choice, and they've broken it up so that none of these people, their elections don't really depend on the views of the Asian population and that the Asian population has been weakened by being divided into three districts. Redistricting washes favored that second argument. That if you have a community of interest, dividing it up is negative because it kind of ruins the ability for that population to elect a candidate with their choice.

And this consolation prize of, well now every council never cares about you a little bit, isn't enough. And the idea is to really strengthen the population by drawing districts to keep that population together.

When we look at other governmental boundaries, one of the biggest, most important governmental boundaries that we've seen is the neighborhoods. Now we don't think of neighborhoods as being true governmental agencies, but as I understand it, the neighborhoods in the city of Santa Ana were actually created with feedback from the community and with the city engaged. These were not drawn willy-nilly. These actually were people debating over where does my neighborhood begin and end, and what is it defined by. And so we can see some really good kind of underlying boundaries for us to look at as we're drawing districts.

When we look at these neighborhoods, they also seem to kind of encapsulate the ethnic populations as well. As you can see in the handouts, the color isn't showing up because of the screen. We have the populations of each of these neighborhoods, the citizen voting age population, and then their Latino and Asian numbers. And you can see some very heavily Latino neighborhoods and some districts with relatively high Asian population as well.

So downtown, Casa Bonita, Concord. So we'll look at these as we go through the process and the maps up here on the wall all show the mantras. When we look at the governmental boundaries, this is the first one that jumps out and this is school districts. Now I don't know about how you view it, but I'm going to my 30th high school reunion, and for me my school district is like how I identify. Like when I went to school, my friends, the community I grew up in, that school is actually something that I feel like I'm a falcon because I'm a 10% of other high school.

So, look at how nicely this government of the unified school district intersection with the city overlays with that population that we identify with South Asian.

We also have state legislative districts. I don't really know what caused these boundaries to look like this. What I really actually like a little bit more and find more instructive is the congressional districts. It looks as though they've created a congressional district over here where they try to take more of the Asian population, put in the 48, and then here the 46 congressional district trying to make more Latino congressional districts.

Precincts. Precincts are something that's a boundary that we have and we can use if we want to a little bit. The nice thing about precincts is when the county registrar draws a precinct, they're saying something. They're saying that literally all of these people can walk to a central location. They're saying that if this precinct right here, everybody in this neighborhood here is in this precinct, They might all walk to the same firehouse or senior citizen center or somebody's garage to vote. They're not going to draw a precinct that cuts a freeway. They're not going to draw a precinct that cuts a river.

They're not going to draw a precinct where you just can't get from one side to the other. So in a way, precincts are a nice little time to do with the rest of the way. When I started drawing lines, based on the first few meetings we had with the community, the things that jumped out were we want to see if we can draw better districts that represent the Asian population and we want to see a better district set keep the neighborhoods together don't divide the neighborhoods so using those as guides I drew some plans and some plans kind of started with the existing

City Council lines but it plans to start from scratch when we look at these plans we want to look at them visually and what neighborhood they put together and we We also want to look at the data. And the most operative things in the data would be these population numbers. And these percentages right here mean how far above or below we are from the median district size. So are our districts equal population? When we see that one district is 1% underpopulated and another district is 1% overpopulated,

that means that the total deviation is 2%. The largest one is 1% bigger, the smallest one is 1% smaller, so the combined is 2%. The other things we want to look at is the Latino density in terms of the voting age population and the Asian density. And in this plan, District A is the one that is 43% Asian. This district looks to try to give a stronger community of interest here for the Asian population and get some Asian population that's down in this area. It does make 43% Asian.

However, when we look at that Garden Grove Unified School District over the way, it still splits that one into three different districts. So one, two, three districts represent the Asian population, But this one district is an influenced Asian district. This one district is going to elect a candidate of choice from the Asian population.

Plan B tried to do a little bit of something with two parts. One is try to create a district that does incorporate more of this garden grow unified school district and maximizes the Asian population. The Asian population in this planet is 45%. But it also has this little hook. And somebody in one of their earlier meetings was asking me about that hook, so I'm going to slide all the way back here to one of the earlier slides to show you.

When we look at the Asian population in this district, there's this little hook here where there's one little pocket with 3% Asian and one little pocket with 16% Asian.

The community can tell me what that is. We can discuss whether that population should be in a district over here or if that population should be in a district over here. But when we're drawing the lines and we're looking to keep together communities of interest, that jumped out as one of the potential things to look at is that these little neighborhoods there,

there's essentially two little neighborhoods there, and those portions could be into a district that people have a little too. But that's just an option. Plan D is the plan that in the plaintiff's arguments they actually wanted us to spend more time discussing. Plan And indeed, does take that Santa Ana D-Flight School District portion and put it into almost entirely into one district.

The percentage of Asians in this district is a little bit lower than the highest one we have, but if this is what is the community of interest, this is how that community views itself, then it might be a better representation. The remaining districts are vertical. We still have a district that is in this northern portion going from horizontal. However, we've taken out the more Asian population called the San Ano River. We've done a pretty good job in here of keeping these neighborhoods together. There are a couple neighborhoods right here where we do have a neighborhood split.

And we would have to decide how to best manage those and communicate about how to touch those little tiny edges if this was a plan or something like this is what was preferred.

So, the process moving forward. We have time here. Anybody who wants to make a comment, we have I think a two or three minute question per person. I can answer questions. You can also submit any questions on the website. On the website are actually more resources for you. This presentation, all of these maps, additional data, a way for you to draw a map or draw a community of interest.

So if you go to the website and you say, look, my neighborhood right here is in this mid-city area, and I think my community of interest extends out like this into like a circle, and that's what I want to submit to the city is my community of interest. That'll go to the city council, that'll come to me, and it'll go into, it'll be incorporated into how we draw future ground plans.

So, your ways of engaging would be through this meeting today, future meetings at City Council, Tuesday nights. The remaining meetings are within the regular City Council agenda, so those are going to be public meetings where you can put together testimony and come up and talk about the plans. and submitting plans or mapping online. And this part of the process is really critical. The reason we've had, I don't know how many, seven probably so far, the reason we've had these is because we want to make sure that we get as much input from the community

and we can incorporate that input to the final plans. And make sure that these plans are drawn and accepted by the community is being legitimate district boundaries with community engagement. So, if people have questions, one, welcome to either fill out a card and I'll call those first, or when I'm done with the cards, just simply ask a question. And then also, I really encourage any input, we have people sending information online. Teresa Lee, question?

Okay. We have one so far. Oh, we've got another one. Thank you.

Can you just talk a little bit about how the timeline is going out with when the community is coming out with how it's going to be?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, like the breaks are in the right way, so they can see a high person. So, the hearings that we have going forward, like I said, they're all concurrent with City Council meetings. On my calendar I have September 18th, which is this coming Tuesday, October 16th and October 30th, with a final meeting on November 20th.

and the City Council is going to have to follow these same criteria. Now the City Council could, in a public meeting, say, I want to unify this neighborhood, or what would it look like if we drew the lines differently, and then I would be tasked with drawing a revision of a certain plan and making that public. What is key is that under this process, any final plan will be public before it's adopted.

So there's not going to be a way for the council to have all these meetings and then go into closed session or just do something and come up with this brilliant new map because everything's different and passive. They can't do that in this process. So all of this is going to be done in a way where the public is engaged now in helping define communities of interest. Any proposed changes are going to be discussed in open sessions. And any revised maps are going to be publicly available. So that's the best I can tell.

Theresa Lee is back. Translation.

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Let me briefly show you that that's what you plan to come along.

My name is Therese Ali. I'm a resident of Santa Ana. I support for the map D. The reason is it has complete all of our communities. Vietnamese, white, and also black, Latino, and Asian, with high income, low income.

and that the Plenty is a city with most of the democratic people and the Plenty keeps the history and the community together. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Chris I want to know that your organization is winter village and that is for people that is these two neighbors is it both or is it just one? Our neighborhoods meet together is one year old, and one year old is one year old. We were both open to our New Hampshire, 60 regions, and ourselves one, but technically it's two. And it's also a very interesting point in your districting plans because you can be drawn in different versions. You're drawn in three different districts. Correct. So the one where you divide us is one of the tenants and one of the products that we can do is to provide us. Okay.

So, currently, right now we have six wards, six city council members, three will remain for the marriage elect, three new ones in November. What happens if we switch to either A, B, C, or B, and now we have two city council members that will be in the same district? So, this is a, it's kind of a little mind trick, it's like a Rubik's Cube thing. Uh, because it, it's really simple, it's really simple, but it gets confusing. So, we're having city council elections this year, city council members being elected from the at-large system. We're going to stay at the at-large system until election day in 2020.

On election day in 2020, those districts are operative and the people get elected only from those districts. The people who got elected in 2018 are still representing our at-large system they got elected. You have three council members from districts, three council members that were elected in the at-large system. Then in 2020, too, you're going to have the remaining three that were previously elected at-large are going to get for re-election in only those districts. So if they don't live in one of those districts, they can't run for re-election. So it's the same thing, it's a shift from one election system to the other,

but it does take over the course of two election cycles to actually phase it in entirely. In the first year in 2020, half the council will have been elected by these district rights, and the other half of the council will essentially be pickovers from the earlier system and still elected from the at-large until they fully are implemented in 2024.

and the one instance where this happens every redistricting is state senate seats. When they move all the state senate seats, they only elect the even ones one year and the odd ones another year. And so there's always this period of gap where somebody might say, like, who's my state senator? because I elected the state senator two years ago who's still my senator, but now there's this other guy who's also my senator because he got elected in the judicial months. So it's always that way.

So it's a, but it will take course over a couple of election cycles. The whole person is going to be just going to be a better person to be in the county of the state. Sure. Now, I'm a little bit. The guy voted for a year ago and now right to the senator, another one. He doesn't have to ever have to be a better person. He doesn't have to listen to me. The inverse. The inverse. The guy you elected two years ago in the outlarge, the guy you elected in 2008 in the outlarge election system, he's still responsible for the outlarge. He's still, his constituents are still everybody in the city,

regardless of what district he currently lives in. And he can go around the area. But where do you draw these? He can say, I no longer represent 4, I represent 10, or 5, so I can't continue. It doesn't do this. It's the inverse. So it's when if somebody lives in this. I'm in 4 to 6 right now. I'm in 4 to 6. But I'm going to go and come to 4 to 4. I can't 4 to 5 but I'm going to go to 4 to 6. It's not worth it.

I'm looking for the light. So your neighborhood, the North and South Windsor Village, are both in North 6. Let's say you can buy my new neighborhood. Now I have a new neighborhood. Let's say you can call it North 5. Now, the person I left is North 5.

The catch is that the whole city voted for Ward 6 in the current system. Everybody voted for that. They're going to stay on the council and everybody voted for that. In the future, if we switch tomorrow to these district systems, this would take effect in 2020 and you would elect somebody and only the people in your district would vote for that. That is more truly like you're representative.

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The guy who wrote now, who I really did, is that right home, right? This is my hand up. That might be interesting. Is there any different dots on that map? Red for current buildings, like so, like so? And blue for potential candidates? I actually just have those maps drawn right now. So that we can see if we're going to be SRL if we vote for X or Y. elect candidate a he lives in another area that he truly won't like represent us in actual fact i'm kim barlow special counsel retained by the city in connection with this

matter as mr mitchell pointed out right now every single council candidate is elected at large so every single council candidate even if they don't live in your ward represents you that isn't going to change until we've gone all the way through two cycles of election and we have a district representative for each district. So who you vote for in 2018, regardless of whether they live in your ward or not, represents when will represent and will continue to represent everyone in the city. I have a text message from a council candidate.

It's a council member that says I don't represent the ward. I have that. So despite them being elected at large currently, unless you live in their warden, they don't represent you. Well, then this won't change anything because we're already going to be working. We don't play too much tribal politics. That's our concern is that you live here, you live here. No, we should look at, we're a city. We all have the same common concerns, the the same common goals, the same common mission, and to split us into little tribes prior to the redistricting, prior to the census, prior to an election is kind of weird.

It puts us at a very big disadvantage. Well, remember, these lines, when they get adopted, will apply in 2020. They don't change anything for this year's election. And then isn't there a requirement under the law that we redistrict after a census? That's correct. So we'll have a census in 2020. So why are we redistricting two years before a census? Because this redistricting relates to the claim that we are not in compliance with the California Board of Education. The judge has a rule done. Will we redraw the lines again in 2022? The council has agreed to go through this process. Let's put a ballot measure on. Right.

And yes, we will be doing it again in 2022. do. But those are typically the ones that occur after census are usually fairly minor shifts. This is a wholesale original. We're using 8 year old data, 2010 census to redraw these, correct, Demographer? You're using the 2010 census data? Partially. We're also using the community The minor shift isn't true at all, Mr. Huizar can tell you. They drew 44% of the Asian population out of Ward 6. Is that correct? 44% of the Asian population was drawn out of Ward 6 by in the last three district teams.

They pushed almost half of the Asian voters out of one ward. So that's not minor. That's not minor. That is drastic. But that wasn't just based on the population shift. That was a census. That was a census redrawing. So my concern is that we're going to do this now, and then in two years when we do a redistricting again, we're going to have to do it again. Why don't we, hold on, why don't we do a vote and determine if the people want this, which I believe most people do, most of us do, but let's do it, it seems like we're rushing into something to only have to rush in and do it again.

Let's determine what the voters want in terms of going to war districts, and then do the district and draw the lines in how would that hurt us in any way well here's the deal it doesn't matter whether you draw the maps now or whether you draw them after the ballot measure assuming it's approved because the reality is either way these lines take effect at the next election which is 2020 but did two years later we have to be wrong and but that's the way it always is every 10 years we're gonna know why are we doing it now we only get in 2012 we didn't do it in 2010 and 2012. You're right. I get that.

But we're doing it now because there's a lawsuit now. But a judge hasn't ruled that there's been an actual CVRA violation, have you? No. So why are we doing this? Who's decided for us to do this? Who told you, I'm directing you to redraw these lines? The city council, not a judge. No judge has said in a court of law, I'm giving you, this is a violation of CVRA, you need to do this. But I can tell you that they will. No, you can't. So our council purposely drew, what you're saying, is that if we're violating the California Voting Rights Act, because our council, our city staff, violated the law and screwed the Asian voters

during the last-In 2012. That's not what I'm saying. But you said it's a violation of the law. Right now, the way that districts are outlined-Is a violation of the law. Right now, it is. I can't tell you what it-Who drew those lines? Who drew those lines though? I can't tell you whether that was the case in 2012. But we're using the same data, aren't we? We're using the 2010 census data that drew these lines. Right? Partly. We're also using updated information from the American Community Service. We're using what? I'm sorry, updated? I'll let you.

So, just to address some of the things that have been back and forth here. First off, you have a very legitimate and something that I hear a lot in redistricting meetings, which is we're drawing these districts and the fear is that we're creating little fiefdoms. And that is something that the legislature in 2001 basically decided for us. And that was that in areas where there's racially polarized voting, that the at-large system is damaging to the voting rights of these populations. And so the creation of districts was preferable.

What's interesting is that the history of it is that the at-large elections used to be a reform. It used to be that when these cities were being formed in the progressive era, they didn't want to have war bosses like they had in Chicago and on the East Coast. And so to rob the war bosses from the ability of controlling just one little neighborhood, handing out jobs to their families and friends and corruption and all that, to eliminate that possibility, they said, we're just going to have that large election system. That way no individual person or little gang can control city elections. The flip side, now 100 years later,

is that they found that the at-large election system harmed these ethnic populations, and the legislature made this tradeoff, had these arguments. Well, what's the harm of having districts? It could be that council members don't feel they represent the entire city anymore. They feel they just represent their council. What's the harm in having at-large? We're violating civil rights. And the legislature made this tradeoff, and your arguments have been debated and continue to be debated in the legislature. Another thing that you asked about is the fact that we're doing a mid-decade census.

I don't think you were here at the very beginning. I talked a little bit about the fact that we're doing a mid-decade census as opposed to waiting for the normal decennial census. And this is my fourth or fifth redistricting project this year. And in every one of those, somebody said, why don't we wait until the new census data? The problem is that there are a bunch of attorneys in California that are suing cities, water boards. I did an irrigation district. I did a hospital district, a harbor district. They're suing, and they're suing now, and they're telling municipalities that they can't wait,

that they have to draw the districts now because, again, there's a civil rights violation.

And so that's why we're doing it now. Now, in terms of the data, the total population number we have to use, based on even a Supreme Court ruling last year, is the most recent decennial census. It's not perfect. In fact, in Santa Ana, it's arguable that Santa Ana was the worst census count, potentially in the country. Correct. And so we're treating the census data as if they're handed down from God, but we know that they're flawed. However, the Supreme Court has said you cannot use any other numbers. You have to use the census data. Now, when I talk about population, how Asian or Latino it is, that number changes every year.

We use the American Community Survey that puts out a five-year rolling average from the surveys that long form the census. they go to one in every six households over the course of a 10-year period. So they're all estimates. So I might say that the census block is 44% Asian. I might come back in nine months when the new data is out and say this census block is 38% Asian. That number is constantly being adjusted by the census. So that portion of it is new data. The portion of it of total population is not new data.

And you're absolutely right that after the 2022 elections, before the 2024 elections, they're going to have to redraw districts. I would argue and agree with the attorney that where they might have done radical redraws in the past, the amount of interest and focus from the plaintiffs and the process that we've gone through is really going to forbid them from being able to wholesale draw a brand new plan. They're going to likely have to make small adjustments. And when I do redistricting in other areas, what I really reinforce is that what we want is the smallest margin of error as possible on each district line.

So that if one does grow and if one does shrink a little bit, we really might be in a situation where we don't need to redraw in 2022 because none of the districts are more than 5% deviation. And I can't even suggest that. the census was so bad in the last cycle, and it could be even worse this cycle, we don't know, that it's hard to, I cannot stand up here and honestly say that there aren't going to be big census changes, so I can't really say that drawing plans to a very tight margin are going to help us in 2022. But this process will happen again, potentially I'll be engaged, who knows,

but I do expect the communities that brought this lawsuit to be deeply engaged, I don't think that the city's going to be able to walk out of a lawsuit that finished 18 months ago and walk into a totally new rediffid thing that would radically change things. So all your points are completely valid, and they're all things that I hear in other places. I would really suggest that since you're only talking to those of us in the room today, that those points, it sounds like you have been going on the website submitting information, so that's really valuable.

I did have one really kind of tight question for you, and that was in these plans there are different versions of your neighborhoods either being in a district that's going to be predominantly Asian or in a district that's going to be predominantly Latino. like this plan A has your district in a configuration that kind of follows some of the boundaries of your current District 6. And it does so in a way that puts you in a district with the Asian population versus this plan keeps you together also in the Asian district.

This one is the one that you most dislike because it splits your two North and South neighborhoods that are, as you're saying, like sisters. And that's really valuable information for me. and this might keep you together in this is if it would be predominantly you know if you really wanted to draw an Asian district you draw line across the bottom of the city so down here correct that would be like 100% Asian district you just were right across the bottom so everything south of Warner basically east to west with I think that would be an Asian district that's a draw lines

north and south versus east and west is again alienating the Asian voters so So let me show you something that jumped out at me. Because I saw something like that when I was looking at the data, too. I live there, I can tell you. My street is completely Asian. So if we drew a line, and I've walked precincts, I've walked over to Oregon, go to the neighborhood means, east to west versus north to south, north to south is, again, punishing the Asian voters. Going east to west is going to be favorable to the Asian voters. Let me respond to that, because that is an interesting thought.

But in one of the plans I attempted to come up here from this dense Asian population down here to some Asian population, like I said, there's some down here that are in the 30s and 20s. What's interesting to me is that, you know, I went to Coast, and I know some of this community, and when I first started looking at this, I thought that this Asian population would really show up more in the numbers. It doesn't show up heavily in the numbers, potentially because there's a lot of white population in that district as well as a lot of Asian population. Hey, but, no, and we talk about race real openly in these meetings, so, you know.

It looks as though two things. The Asian density is greater in some of these neighborhoods than the median Asian density of 17%. But it also looks like it's not as dense as up here. And honestly, the population is not as dense. So if I drew a district that went east to west here, it'd be severely underpopulated. It seems as though the communities are more spread out there, not as densely populated. When I'm drawing these districts, it seems as though more of the population is coming from up here and less of the population is more spread out down there. The whole bottom left corner of the map, that whole area, that's all pedestrian.

There's no people that live there. As an example, I tried drawing something that was this whole area right here below and this thing, and it didn't get close to being a full district. That was the challenge. It was like 28,000 people. So I would need, you know, to come like up here. And then I do that, and the age of population of that is actually really low. It flips the other way. So it's a challenge. It's like playing Rubik's Cube a little bit. Alright, I think we spent a lot of time on that. But thank you. Are there any other questions?

You said that you were asked to look into the Plan B a lot more. Yeah. So is that kind of what they're looking as the basis for everything? I think the City Council will have conversations, meeting conversations about what they might like or dislike about different plans. And as I understand it, the plaintiffs didn't say, like, it must be plan B. But I will tell you something. In these meetings, this plan has been the one that has been most brought up. and it's not only been brought up by the Asian population but also by the Latino population.

So just from the community feedback, this plan seems to be the one that generates the greatest conversation. You're saying it's a good one? Most positive, yeah. More people have said plan A. Do you know how many neighborhoods are split in that plan? I can do a population of it. I usually, when we do get closer to kind of consensus around the plan, I'll do some reports on it, like we were talking about with an overlay of the old districts and new districts to say what you're going to what districts. And then also neighborhood splits. I can see a few neighborhood splits. There's a neighborhood split over here. From the west side.

San Juanita looks like it. This is not a neighborhood split, but it looks like it is. So you actually look at the data. That's not a neighborhood split. So I don't think there's... There's split. That's a split right there. So yeah, we can look at it. And actually all the mountains have really good neighborhood lines in them. So, yeah. So, in most of your discussion with us, you keep referring to the Asian population, the Asian community. So we're having elections this November. I think there's 11 candidates. Of the 11 candidates, I think 10 are Latino, Hispanic. There's one who's half Asian. So can you talk about the...

It's not about the Asian community. it's about a candidate of their preference. Exactly, that's the right terminology. So why are we constantly referring to the Asian community? We've got 11 people running, 10 are Latino, Hispanic. Who is their candidate of preference just come around? Yeah. So a couple things. When we talk about drawing districts, we are talking about maximizing the ability of that community to elect a candidate of choice. and that doesn't have to be an Asian candidate or doesn't have to be a Latino candidate. There are parts of Los Angeles where I've done redistricting where you have data on voters that support,

and the Latino district will end up supporting a Jewish candidate. Or in a Jewish neighborhood, they'll end up supporting an African American candidate like Karen Bass, the congressman, represents a really strong Jewish area. And if you were to look at drawing them as a community of interest, they have shown a history of supporting African American candidates. So it's not like just a solid line, population is this ethnicity, the candidates have to be this ethnicity. And it's also not outcome based. We don't draw these districts and then determine whether they were good or not based on the types of candidates that were elected.

What we have is in the Matt Brown process, we have data that we've been told by Supreme Court precedents is something we can use to identify the population, the citizen voting age population. And we can draw districts that meet each redistricting criteria, equal population, preserving communities of interest, being contiguous, being compact, and as a part of that process, but not the only part of that process, considering the ethnicity of those populations. The idea is that if you take these populations and draw them as densely as possible into districts, that they will maximize their ability to elect candidates of their own choice.

It doesn't get into who's running, you know, what's coming up in the next election and all that. So there's a little splitting of those two concepts.

Yes? Can you speak to the staggering of the election? To their point, is that something required by law? How come we don't just have a special election? Perfect question. Totally perfect question. A lot of people have argued, okay, we're going to change these boundaries. Let's just start with a clean slate, right? And let's just elect all six council members today, like in the next election, just elect all six. The challenge is this. The number one rule in elections is preserving voter choice. And if voters in the outlarge election system elected somebody to a four-year term,

it really, really requires something extraordinary to invalidate that election. and call for all new elections and take away that person's right to an existing council seat.

The only way essentially to have like a clean slate election would be to, in this round of elections, say everybody's firm is only two years, and then in four years... And they've done that before, Anaheim did that. So that is the only way in which you have to kind of set up that idea of a clean slate. But the number one rule is that if in November they're having elections and those elections are set, the candidates are set, we can't do anything about it, those elections are happening, that the voters' choices in that election for those four-year terms, that takes precedent over everything else.

That we're preserving the voter choice. So that's why we have to end it staggering. But, sorry, but so is that a law? Like is that part of the state law, federal law, or is that something the council decides? Yes. Yeah, because Anaheim did stagger elections. So it's too late to do two years? They are staggered under state law. It is too late to change these elections to be like a two-year election.

And, you know, a lot of it just has to do with that principle of, you know, if you're going to elect somebody. Sometimes when people get drawn out of their district, they'll say, well, that person doesn't live in the district anymore. Well, they got elected in the old system to fulfill that four-year term, and so they have to be allowed to fulfill that four-year term. So what happened in Palmdale where their city council members stayed on for an additional two years? Yeah, so there have been some instances where they nullify an election. The court comes in and nullifies an election.

And when they nullify an election, they can force them to draw districts and then have a new election like in a two-year period. We were fortunate, I think, in this process that there was an agreement made with the city and the courts to allow kind of a more methodical pattern of implementing this. And that's the process that we're under. But yeah, there have been things done where, you know, in the city of Los Angeles, they voted for all the council elections to be for six years instead of four years for them to be able to switch elections. for them to be able to stagger out and change election cycles.

But then they are, after all said and done, they're going to be continuing on that staggered system.

So, that's it. I have a question for you. We're talking about transparency, democracy, just basic decent human rights here. The council paid for a report. I believe it was you guys. Oh, I never did. I didn't. Somebody did a report that we spent $50,000, if I'm not mistaken, to get a report back that says, are we or are we not in violation of the California Voting Rights Act? Am I wrong? Is something wrong? And it's never been released to the public. Why?

Shouldn't we, before we do this process, dream this process, after this process, shouldn't that information be made available to the voters? that we paid for it. Shouldn't we see that information that knows that what did we do? What did we do wrong? What did we do right? And how do we somehow meet in the middle so that everybody in this city has a voice? So, all I know about this issue is I'm jokingly going to say, all I know is what I read the papers. I haven't seen the report. I haven't even asked for the report.

Oftentimes in these processes, when there's going to be litigation, the city council will decide to go into closed session, get a private report done that is not something that would be public and then the people suing them would get to see, essentially, and try to determine their vulnerability before a lawsuit happens. I think that happens a lot in other areas of the law rather than just redistricting where if they think they're going to get sued over something, they'll get a legal opinion from somebody and that legal opinion will stay private so that they're not just like handing the plaintiffs

their own legal advice. And it allows them to kind of really judge how vulnerable are we to this lawsuit. This has been done in some cities. I've been a part of those kinds of internal client privilege memos for other agencies like school districts, community colleges throughout the years, but I did not do this one in Santa Ana. And it's the City Council's decision whether or not they want to make that public. Part of their decision might be that the you know that that is attorney-client privilege and that there's you know potential harm that

could come from making something public. So I'm not privy to why. The only reason I know that there is such a thing is because I saw staff nod their head but I've never seen it.

Yes, there's been a lot of discussion since our last election two years ago about the residency requirements for candidates. Right now you're only required 30 days prior to the deadline. There was an issue in the last election. There's an issue now with the candidate members who couldn't seem to figure out which address to use so we were in the right board. Does this change any of that or help make sure the people actually live in the district of wards they're actually running for?

So this will require the individuals who are running for office to live in these wards, and it will require that only people who live in these wards are voting for them. I can't speak to the actual city ordinance about residency, but I do know from my other experience with this, that the real residency requirement is generally that when they're signing the form running for office, they say I'm living with this address, that's a legal document. And if they lie on that legal document, then that can be, it's not a felony, it's a misdemeanor, it's a felony.

And so when you've seen cases of somebody's residency being brought up, like there's a state center in Los Angeles, there's another one in San Fernando Valley, there's one in like the actual lawsuit wasn't whether they lived in that district or not, it was whether they lied on that form or not. And so as I understand that you can't have like a residency department, somebody lives there a year before or whatever, that you can require that they live in that district when they file and that when they sign that form, they're not violating law by law. Those are the things that are operative in the protections.

And the attorney says I answered that right. Yeah. I believe Mayor of , this question, I'm not full of . That was one of our main, that he used about . the system is that people were just, you know, they have a second address in the board and they'll just run into that board. But she said, I don't know if you feel like I saw it in the session, but she said she wanted something to make sure that somebody who has a second address there is a new place or whatever and she also wanted the competition to do this

measure. So I hope that this one everything has to be so much of a . Yeah, that's an issue that the local governments really can't control. The courts have told us that the maximum period of time we can require residency prior to someone running is 30 days. But the law does require that the person who is elected from the district or even say why, must have continuous residency within the city and when you have districts within the district the entire time that they are serving that role. If they move out of the district,

they become ineligible to retain that office. They essentially voluntarily vacant that office. What does move out mean? That means they don't reside. What if you sleep three nights a week or four nights a week in another city? Well, docile is an interesting concept. It's very complex legally. it is wherever you intend to maintain your permanent home. So by way of example, students go off to college, they may be in Massachusetts, but their domicile is still accountable, right? Military, same thing.

Obviously, you've seen Mr. Mitchell mention some of the litigation that has surrounded the question of where someone actually is domiciled, where they are actually residing. We can't do anything about that except to say it's a fact-specific inquiry. It has to do with the state of mind of the individual where they intend to have their permanent principles. So if they happen to be staying in a different area for some period of time because they're taking care of mom who's ill or something like that, that doesn't mean they don't reside anymore in their district. That means they are temporarily doing something else

in order to deal with a family member, but they don't plan to move away, they actually intend to maintain their domicile. That's an edge of control. Right. And I think it's the county DA that has to bring those kind of cases against individuals.

All righty. So it looks as though we've kind of gotten to the end of questions. I really appreciate all the comments and feedback. This is essentially going to move to city council meetings going forward. Each of the City Council meetings are going to have the same kind of presentation of what's happening. Each City Council meeting is going to have the maps. And each City Council meeting is going to have an opportunity for you to come up and address the Council and ask questions. But we've had, like I said, I think seven of these. I think they've gone really well. So I want to thank you very much for attending.

And I encourage you to come to future meetings. and as much as you can, take this really important input and put it up on the website by going to the site, drawing maps, submitting information. And that's it. Thank you very much. And again, special thanks to the translators. I think you did an awesome job. Thank you very much.